"Novel" Memoir Skips Much of Interest

ON EARTH WE'RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS (Penguin, 2019)

By OCEAN VUONG

Review by Hugh Murray

One recipe for comedy is to juxtapose the anticipated and expected to, or replace it with, the incongruous. (This is not a joke.) One common example: “Seven days without God makes one weak.” Poetry can be somewhat similar, describing a noun with an unusual adjective, or the adjective with an incongruous adverb. These surprising descriptions can provide amusement to the reader, or they may seem confusing, or profound, or a bit of all. Vuong indulges in much such word play, some simple, some belabored. After telling of the long flights of monarch butterflies from his home in Connecticut to Mexico, he compares a book's page to a folded monarch's wings. Then, when they open, will they fly away with the book? Too heavy. Admittedly, some of his comparisons are poetic, and the reader can pause to ponder. But sometimes the comparisons add nothing to the prose nor to the thought. It is simply another stop sign on the road through this “novel” memoir.

Vuong provides portraits of his grandmother Lan, his mother Rose, and shorter, more narrow sketches of his “grandfather” Paul, and his slightly older teen-age lover Trevor.

But there is so much that is NOT there! Vuong, born in Saigon in 1988 is brought to America when he was 4 to live in poverty in a poor section of Hartford, Connecticut. How did he get to the US? With his mom and grandma at that time? His father too? All together, or in spurts? The dad Vietnamese? There is nothing in this book about the boy in school, who knows almost no English, and being Vietnamese, is most likely smaller than most other kids his age. How was he treated? And mistreated? Who, if any, befriended him? How did this affect his character? Much of the book is about his mother (indeed, the book is an epistle to her). However, even when he sets off for a job on a tobacco farm at age 14, was this mainly for financial reasons, or because of disappointments in school? Working with tobacco his first day, his co-workers address him in Spanish, assuming he is another of the illegal aliens working there. Vuong was soon treated kindly by the Hispanic lead worker, who assigned him a task he could do (with effort). Working there, the lad meets Trevor, the 17-year-old white son of the farm's owner; Trevor, like the hired hands, also works the fields. They hit it off, and in time, engage in sex after work. After various explorations, the innocent boys are both shocked and embarrassed to discover that sometimes during anal sex, sh*t happens. One of the few amusing episodes. Like Trevor, Vuong snorts coke, but declining to go along with everything his older friend does and offers, Vuong refuses to inject heroine.

Unlike “white privileged” Trevor, Vuong receives a scholarship to a Brooklyn College. Again, the role of the public school in this transformation is absent. What, how did this happen? I would prefer less poetry and more answers to how a small guy with no English is metamorphed in a decade into a scholarship student in another state? This might be quite a story from which many might learn. Meanwhile, the “privileged” white male Trevor, over does it and dies at 22.

Vuong returns to Vietnam with the ashes of his grandmother, but present-day Vietnam is another absentee from this volume. It might crowd out monarch butterflies flights or cliff jumps by buffaloes.

Perhaps asking for Vuong's survival kit is going too far, but with odds against him, he did survive and do well. Perhaps, the title provides a clue – he and we all are gorgeous. But we know that that is a lie. True, some are gorgeous, but usually for only a short span; and some are not and were never gorgeous; and some are hideous. But on some level after high school, we all learn that as pleasant as eye-candy is, it cannot sustain us; we also require, need, the ugliness of most proteins. For adults, the main meal is soup to nuts, not much eye-candy. This short book is episodic, jumping round in time, explicit on street names in Hartford and other sites, inclusive of some Asian superstitions, echoes of war, somewhat poetic, but omitting so much of what must have been important.